“He’s crazy,” Thomas said. “Come on, let’s go.” They turned the horses into the trail and let them have their heads, for the fog was too thick for a man to find his way. They came to the crease where the violent growth and the redwoods were. Every leaf dripped moisture, and the shreds of the mist clung to the tree trunks like tattered flags. The men were half way to the pass before the fog began to thin and break and whirl about like a legion of ghosts caught by the daylight. At last the trail climbed above the mist level and, looking back, Joseph and Thomas saw the tumbling sea of fog extending to the horizon; covering from sight the sea and the mountain slopes. And in a little they reached the pass and looked over at their own dry dead valley, burning under the vicious sun, smoking with heat waves. They paused in the pass and looked back at the green growth in the canyon they had come from, and at the grey sea of fog.
“I hate to leave it,” Thomas said. “If there were only feed for the cattle I would move over.”
Joseph looked back only for a moment, and then he started ahead over the pass. “It isn’t ours, Thomas,” he said. “It’s like a beautiful woman, and she isn’t ours.” He urged his horse over the hot broken rock. “The old man knew a secret, Tom. He told me some straight clean things.”
“He was crazy,” Thomas insisted. “In any other place he would be locked up. What did he have all of those caged creatures for?”
Joseph though of explaining. He tried to think how he would begin. “Oh, he—keeps them to eat,” he said. “It isn’t easy to shoot game, and so he traps the things and keeps them until he needs them.”
“But that’s all right,” Thomas said more easily. “I thought there was something else. If that’s all it is, I don’t mind. His craziness hasn’t to do with the animals and birds then.”
“Not at all,” said Joseph.
“If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have walked away. I was afraid there was some ceremony.”
“You are afraid of every kind of ritual, Thomas. Do you know why?” Joseph slowed his horse so that Thomas could come closer.
“No, I don’t know why,” Thomas admitted slowly, “it seems a trap, a kind of little trap.”
“Perhaps it is,” Joseph said. “I hadn’t thought of it.” When they had got down the slope to the river source with its dry and brittle moss and its black ferns, they drew up under a bay tree. “Let’s go over the ridge and drive in any cattle we can see,” Thomas said. They left the river and followed the shoulder of the ridge, and the dust clouded up and clung about them. Suddenly Thomas pulled up his horse and pointed down the slope. “There, look there.” Fifteen or twenty little piles of picked bones lay on the sidehill, and grey coyotes were slinking away toward the brush, and vultures roosted on the ribs and pulled off the last strips of flesh.
Thomas’ face was pinched. “That’s what I saw before. That’s why I hate the country. I’ll never come back,” he cried. “Come on, I want to get to the ranch. I want to start away tomorrow if I can.” He swung his horse down the hill and spurred it to a trot, and he fled from the acre of bones.
Joseph kept him in sight, but he did not try to follow him. Joseph’s heart was filled with sorrow and with defeat. “Something has failed,” he thought. “I was appointed to care for the land, and I have failed” He was disappointed in himself and in the land. But he said, “I won’t leave it. I’ll stay here with it. Maybe it isn’t dead.” He thought of the rock in the pines, and excitement arose in him. “I wonder if the little stream is gone. If that still flows, the land is not dead. I’ll go to see, pretty soon.” He rode over the ridge top in time to see Thomas gallop up to the houses. The fences were down around the last stacks of bay, and the voracious cattle were eating holes in it. As Joseph came close, he saw how lean they were, and poor, and how their hips stuck out. He rode to where Thomas ta1ked with the rider Manuel.
“How many?” he demanded.
“Four hundred and sixteen,” Manuel said. “Over a hundred gone.”
“Over a hundred!” Thomas walked quickly away. Joseph, looking after him, saw him go into the barn. He turned back to the rider.
“Will these others make it to the San Joaquin, Manuel?” Manuel shrugged slightly. “We go slow. Maybe we find a little grass. Maybe we get some over there. But we lose some cows, too. Your brother hates to lose the cows. He likes the cows.”
“Let them eat all the hay,” Joseph ordered. “When the hay is gone, we will start.”
“The hay will be gone tomorrow,” Manuel said.
They were loading the wagons in the yard, mattresses and chicken coops and cooking utensils, piled high and carefully. Romas came in with another rider to help with the herds. Rama would drive a buckboard, Thomas, a Studebaker wagon with grain for the horses and two barrels of water. There were folded tents on the wagons, supplies of food, three live pigs and a couple of geese. They were taking everything to last until winter.
In the evening Joseph sat on his porch, watching the last of the preparation, and Rama left her work and came to him and sat on the step. “Why do you stay?” she asked.
“Someone must take care of the ranch, Rama.”
“But what remains to be taken care of? Thomas is right, Joseph; there’s nothing left.”
His eyes sought the ridge where the dark pines were. “There’s something left, Rama. I’ll stay with the ranch.” She sighed deeply. “I suppose you want me to take the baby.”
“Yes. I wouldn’t know how to care for it.”
“You know it won’t be a very good life for him in a tent.”
“Don’t you want to take him, Rama?” he asked.
“Yes, I want him. I want him for my own.”
Joseph turned away and looked up at the pine forest again. The last of the sun was sinking over the Puerto Suelo. Joseph thought of the old man and of his sacrifice. “Why do you want the child?” he asked softly.
“Because he is part of you.”
“Do you love me, Rama? Is that it?”
Her breath caught harshly in her throat. “No,” she cried, “I am very near to hating you.”
“Then take the child,” he said quickly “This child is yours. I swear it now. He is yours forever. I have no more claim on him.” And he looked quickly back to the pine ridge, as though for an answer.
“How can I be sure?” Rama fretted. “When I have made my mind over so the baby is my own, when he has come to think of me as his mother, how can I be sure you will not come and take him away?”
He smiled at her, and the calm he knew came upon him. He pointed to the dead and naked tree beside the porch. “Look, Rama! That was my tree. It was the center of the land, a kind of father of the land. And Burton killed it.”
He stopped and stroked his beard and turned the ends under, as his father had done. His eyes drooped with pain and tightened with resistance to the pain. “Look on the ridge where the pines are, Rama,” he said. “There’s a circle in the grove, and a great rock in the circle. The rock killed Elizabeth. And on the hill over there are the graves of Benjy arid Elizabeth.” She stared at him uncomprehendingly. “The land is struck,” he went on. “The land is not dead, but it is sinking under a force too strong for it. And I am staying to protect the land.”
“What does all this mean to me?” she asked. “To me or to the child?”
“Why,” he said, “I don’t know. It might help, to give the child to you. It seems to me a thing that might help the land.”
She brushed her hair back nervously, smoothed it beside the part. “Do you mean you’re sacrificing the child? Is that it, Joseph?”
“I don’t know what name to give it,” he said. “I am trying to help the land, and so there’s no danger that I shall take the child again.”
She stood up then, and backed away from him slowly. “Good-bye to you, Joseph,” she said. “I am going in the morning, and I am glad, for I shall always be afraid of you now. I shall always be afraid.” Her lips trembled, and her eyes filled with tears. “Poor lonely man!” She hurried away toward her house, but Joseph smiled gravely up at the pine grove.